Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) (2 page)

Lizzy shrugged at him and followed Georgie,
shoving her way through the elbows that all seemed to be aimed at
her nose or the side of her head.

The first bedroom was empty of people but
stank of vomit. Georgie shut the door and moved on.

Lizzy grabbed the next door and slammed it
open.

The guy’s pants were around his knees, and
the pale moon of his bare ass almost eclipsed Rae’s long, auburn
hair spilling over the flowered bedspread. Her limp arm didn’t
move.

Lizzy strode across the room, unholstering
her Taser from her purse because Lizzy always carried at least one
weapon. The red laser dot shined on Dumbass’s fleshy ass cheek. She
yanked the trigger.

The needles flashed, trailing silver
wires.

“
Yeeeeargh!”
Dumbass screamed. He
flopped to the floor, rigid with a seizure. She held the handle,
letting the full thirty seconds of excruciating pain run their
course.

Dumbass collapsed.

Lizzy blew over the barrel of her Taser like
she was blowing away gunsmoke.

An angry burn mark glowed red around the
electrodes buried in his white butt.

Georgie said, “Wow. That Taser left a burn on
his ass.”

Lizzy climbed on the bed beside Rae and shook
her. Rae didn’t respond. Her auburn hair covered most of her face,
but her lips were slack.

“Rae?” Lizzy shook her and glanced up
again.

Georgie’s brown eyes were wide with shock.
Her hand crept toward her mouth.

Lizzy said, “Don’t just stand there like a
Benny caught in headlights. Help me!”

Georgie shook her head to shake off her
horror. They grabbed Rae’s shoulders and hips and hauled, flipping
Rae right-side up. She was nothing but floppy dead weight.

“Hi,” Rae said. Drugs blurred her voice like
her tongue was as floppy as her limp arms. “M’fine.”

“Rae!” Georgie said, looking down at them
both. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Looks like she got rufie’d.” Lizzy shook her
head. Surely they had taught Rae better than to drink out of a
damned open cup at a Delta Chi party, but maybe they should have
spelled it out. They should have stuck closer to her. Shit, they
should have knocked the cup out of her hand and dragged her naive
butt back to the dorm.

Georgie glanced back at Dumbass, who was
still twitching on the floor. “Rapist asshole. We should let The
Dom have his ass. The Dom hates rapists.”

Dumbass managed to get a shaking leg under
him and rubbed his face on the dirty carpeting.

Lizzy said, “Hey! The rapist asshole is
trying to stand up!”

“Tase him again,” Georgie said. “I’ll get her
pants on, and we’ll get her out of here.”

Lizzy hoisted her Taser and clicked the
trigger. A bolt of blue lightning danced across the top of the gun.
She jammed the handle right into the Dumbass’s scrotum, and his
eyes widened just as she felt her own mouth pull into a violent
grin. “Pain is weakness leaving the body, asshole.”

The next morning, Lizzy and Georgie sat on
the sides of Rae’s narrow bed while Rae huddled under the sheets.
They were laughing at her for being so hungover from the vodka and
rufie cocktail and stalwartly ignoring the tang of orange-juice
vomit wafting from the bathroom. Georgie would clean it later.
Lizzy had cleaned up after her often enough that Georgie owed the
universe a few favors.

Lizzy held a coffee mug of diluted green
sports drink and maneuvered the straw to Rae’s parched lips,
betting that Rae wouldn’t drink from an open cup that someone else
poured for her at a frat party again. Live and learn.

Lizzy was damp with sweat from an early
morning workout at the university Field House, an hour of strength,
an hour of cardio, and an hour of training. Her back twinged from a
back handspring landed wrong, but she had bulled past it and
overcome. Pain never stopped Lizzy.

Rae sucked the green stuff and coughed,
grimacing.

Rae’s dorm room walls were a mish-mash of
conservative normal and religious nutcase posters. Lizzy hoped that
the banners of rock bands, Broadway shows, and some far-away
beaches were Rae’s and that the gaudy cliche Christian crap
belonged to Hester the Repressor.

Georgie told Rae, “Your ass would be as sore
as your brain if we hadn’t figured out where he took you.”

Lizzy grinned and fluffed her shorn hair, a
styling accident she was still living with. “I’ll bet Corn-Fed
Asshole has a Taser migraine this morning, and toasted nuts.”

“I cannot believe you tased him on the nuts,
Lizzy.” Georgie’s grin was all teeth. She was in full shark-lawyer
mode this morning, first insisting that they call the cops last
night (overruled), then reiterating her demand this morning (also
overruled). Rae had refused outright for some stupid reason,
probably embarrassment and worry about an assault charge for
Lizzy.

Lizzy didn’t care about an assault charge.
She would thoroughly enjoy fighting a charge and smearing Dumbass’s
name all over the internet while she did it. “He
so
had it
coming. I doubt he’ll be able to have kids. You were right,
though,” she told Georgie. “We should have called The Dom last
night.”

Her stomach panged at saying his name out
loud. Lizzy didn’t flinch, though. She was tougher than that by a
long shot.

Georgie said, “Yeah, we should have called
him. Too late, now.”

Lizzy talked to Georgie right over the top of
Rae’s chest. “It’s never too late. Remember when that guy
date-raped Sarah last year? The Dom lured him into the club with
that special, private invitation and then worked on him for hours.
I heard that guy still has a nervous tic on one side of his face.”
She hoped he did, anyway.

“Ladies?” Rae asked. “Can I have some privacy
here?”

“Why? You gonna puke again?” Georgie
asked.

“I just want to sleep this off.”

Lizzy felt a little pity for Rae and fed her
some more green sports drink, but pain was weakness leaving the
body. Rae should be a little stronger, or at least a little wiser,
after this rufie migraine passed.

Georgie checked the time on her phone and
asked Rae, “Don’t you have class in an hour?”

“I’m not going to class.” Rae clutched the
left side of her head, which was probably the side where the pain
was worst.

“You never miss class.” Lizzy prepared to
stand up and rip the blankets back. Rae had gone to class with all
manners of maladies the last two years, from walking pneumonia to
butt-clenching diarrhea. There are no secrets when you share a
bathroom.

Rae closed her eyes. “I don’t care.”

“Rae, what’s up with you?” Georgie asked.

“I have a hangover. A really bad one.”

Lizzy’s gaze met Georgie’s worried stare
across the bed. Georgie’s brown eyes were twitching with
concern.

Georgie was so right. It was odd. Rae didn’t
state the dreadfully obvious, and she wasn’t a wuss. Lizzy touched
Rae’s hand that was lying her stomach.

“What is
really
up with you?” Georgie
pressed.

“Yeah, Rae.” Lizzy tried to keep her voice
light. Was Rae sick? Had she been so naive that some guy had talked
her into getting smushed without a dickwrap? “We’re your friends.
You can tell us.”

She opened her eyes enough to squint.
“Nothing.”

Lizzy glanced up at Georgie, and she could
see all the panic on her own face written in Georgie’s brown
eyes.

Georgie turned back to Rae and said, “No
bullshit, Rae. What’s up with you?”

“All right. I’m failing statistics.”

That was it? A class? A freaking class? Lizzy
looked up to Heaven to give thanks and to pray for the strength to
not choke the shit out of Rae for scaring them so much.

Lizzy hopped to her knees, jostling the bed
and causing Rae to moan. “So drop it and take it over next
semester!”

Rae whined, “Drop-date is way past, and it’s
a core class. If I fail stats, I lose my scholarship. My parents
can’t and won’t pay for college. I’m done. I’m out. I’m just
partying away my last couple of weeks before I go home at spring
break, get a dead-end job, and probably marry some guy in the same
circumstances and pop out a couple kids who won’t have a chance to
do better, either.”

Okay, so it wasn’t just one class. It had
real repercussions. Time to suck it up.

Lizzy said, “And you’re just going to lie
down and let all that happen to you.”

Rae winced at Lizzy’s sarcasm, but someone
had to kick her ass. Rae said, “I had one chance, and I blew
it.”

Surely there was a way around this. “Can’t
you get a tutor or something so you could ace the final?”

“Nope,” Rae said. The hoarseness in her voice
sounded like the vodka vomit had scalded her throat. “Final’s only
worth fifteen percent. Even if I aced it, I would still fail the
class. I need at least a B in core classes to keep the scholarship,
anyway.”

“Damn,” Lizzy and Georgie said together.

Rae needed money for college. Lots of it. She
had shown them her plans for her autism clinic, A Ray of Light, a
year before. That kind of ambition had sparked a little jealousy in
Lizzy, but watching Rae push for it this year had been incredible.
Every time Rae talked about it, she lit up with happiness, and
Lizzy felt that glow take hold in herself.

Lizzy and Georgie had plenty of money for
college. Lizzy had a nest egg of almost fifty thousand dollars.
Georgie had almost half her law school tuition saved.

For her autism clinic, Rae needed more money
than that, a lot more, seven figures more.

Lizzy looked at Georgie across the bed again,
seeking permission with her eyes, but Georgie tilted her head and
pursed her lips, advising restraint.

Rae was watching them from below her arm that
she had thrown across her face. Her bloodshot eyes tracked their
unspoken conversation. “What?”

She might be hungover, but she wasn’t
oblivious.

Georgie turned to Rae. She sucked in a deep
breath, an against-her-better-judgment type of breath. “Your
parents won’t help? You really don’t have any other way to stay in
college?”

“Nope.” Rae’s deep brown eyes swiveled
between them, watching them both.

Lizzy knew what Georgie wanted to hear before
they spilled the beans. She asked, “No rich uncles who can lend you
the money? Loans? Grants?”

Rae’s suspicious look at her kind of hurt
because Lizzy was the one trying to get her on board. Rae said, “No
one in my family who I could ask for help is rich or even
middle-class. It’s too late to apply for loans for next year, and
the government has cut grants to the bone anyway. I can’t even go
back to community college for a semester because I’m done with my
general education credits.”

The front door in the study room slammed,
rattling the thin walls and fluttering the awful posters.

Well, that shot this moment all to shit.
Lizzy rolled her eyes, but Georgie’s wary gaze meant that she
viewed this as a chance to discuss and regroup.

Just because her best friend wanted to be a
lawyer didn’t mean that Lizzy wanted to present an annotated
argument for every decision they made.

Rae’s roommate-slash-cousin Hester the
Repressor walked into the dorm bedroom. Hester glanced at Georgie
and Lizzy, who were comforting Rae in her time of suffering, and
snorted her indignation. Hester swept out of the bedroom and into
the bathroom, trailing disdain.

Rae closed her eyes and groaned. “When you
guys leave, she’s going to rag on me about this. That’s another
reason I went to Delta Chi, to get out of this dorm room. Yesterday
afternoon, she got all ‘The wages of sin are death,’ on me when I
was trying to study for my abnormal psych test.”

Fuck it all. When you have the key to rescue
someone from misery, you hand it over with joy in your heart.
“Actually,” Lizzy leaned down and whispered very softly, very near
Rae’s pink ear, “the wages of sin are about two hundred bucks an
hour.”

“Yeah. Right.” Rae’s closed eyes clenched
like she was trying to hold back tears.

Over Rae’s chest, Georgie caught Lizzy’s eye.
Her wide eyes held trepidation. “Are you sure about this?”

Lizzy wasn’t going to let Rae fall. “It
wouldn’t hurt to see if things might work out for her.”

“Okay, then.” Georgie leaned down, pulled her
long, brown braid behind her, and whispered in Rae’s other ear. “My
parents don’t help me out with money, either. I work ten hours a
week, and I pay my own way. Everything. Tuition. Dorm. Meal plan.
Books. Plus extra money left over.”

Lizzy smiled. Sometimes, doing the right
thing meant taking a chance.

Rae’s voice lightened with wonder. “That’s,
like, two thousand dollars a week.”

Lizzy whispered, “And the perks are
fantastic. You should see some of the parties we go to. We only
went to the frat with you last night because you seemed all
nuts.”

Rae admitted, “I was nuts.”

Georgie’s voice lowered until it was her
come-hither voice that Lizzy knew from work. “Come with us to a
party tonight. We want you to meet someone.”

Rae groaned and tried to roll over in the
bed. “I am in no condition to meet anyone.”

Lizzy grabbed the cup and held it near Rae’s
face again. “You’ll be fine by tonight. Drink the green stuff.”

Rae winced, but she took a good, long suck of
the sports drink.

Georgie jerked her head toward the bathroom,
meaning that they needed to talk in private.

As the girls cut through the shared bathroom
back to their own bedroom, shimmying past Hester, Lizzy asked
Georgie, “Does she have anything to wear? She’s a lot taller than
we are.”

“We can get her something from the costume
racks. I’ll check her closet for her size.” Georgie called back to
Rae, “Be ready at seven with your make-up and hair done like you’re
going to a high society wedding.”